Laurence Fearnley: Room

Victoria University Press

$24.95

Review: Penelope Bieder*

A perplexing story is this, by a gifted and fearless Christchurch writer. Laurence Fearnley was born there in 1963 and from the mid-1980s she worked as a curator, before leaving in 1997 to take up writing. Room, her first novel, follows short stories and a novella.

Slowly it draws you in, despite a mood of unease, of menacing claustrophobia, that reflects rather too well the book's title.

Dysfunctional Amelia, the anti-heroine, is a flaky doctor who works in an abortion clinic, an unlikely place at odds with her personality.

She lives in a dislocated world (room?) of her own, and finds it hard to focus on her patients' emotional needs. She finds the practical side of her work reassuringly routine.

When a 15-year-old Russian patient, Elena, fails to make an appointment, the events that follow throw up memories and issues that Amelia must deal with. It is time to sort out her relationships with the other staff at the clinic, with her long-dead parents and, not least, with her ex-husband Paul.

Bleak subject matter, maybe, highly political too, but there is lyrical writing to be found here and, thank goodness, levity. Fearnley has an eye for detail, and it's the minutiae that save this sometimes grim story, making it human. Amelia has always carefully avoided entering her patients' worlds but now Elena forces her to.

Amelia fixes porridge for dinner only to find there's no milk. She forces the porridge down with red wine, swigged from the bottle. When she has fish and chips at the beach, she wipes the grease from her fingers on her socks, or rubs them through her hair. This (mildly depressed?) Amelia seems at odds with the efficient medic who craves order and routine. I would have thought the Amelia from the clinic would keep a well-stocked fridge, at the very least.

A flawed first novel, a self-conscious, sometimes stilted work, with a few annoyingly unresolved issues, plus an unloved, unlovable heroine. Yet there is a strong sense of place and landscape, there is colour and there is life.

* Penelope Bieder is a freelance writer.